By Sophia Petros

“Blue for me is the color of the blockade, hunger and war.” Upon entering renowned photographer Boris Mikhailov’s recent exhibit at the Marian Goodman Gallery, a viewer unfamiliar with the artist’s work or Ukraine’s history might instinctively map the country’s current struggles onto its previous hardships.

The oldest series of photographs shown, Salt Lake (1986), presents a zig-zagging black-and-white portfolio of Ukrainians enjoying a day at the beach. The setting is far from idyllic: people bathe around semi-submerged concrete pipes and lounge upon rocky, post-industrial shores. Yet rather than invoking sadness, these images capture a hopeful resilience: the ability to find joy amid industrial debris and the failed progress it symbolizes. Despite this broken promise of a landscape, the people in these photos frolic, stretch, gossip, lounge… they live.

Color seeps in as the photographs approach the present day. In the next series, By the Ground (1991), Mikhailov intentionally washes his subjects in sepia hues, portraying a country emerging from the Soviet Union. When first exhibited in the 90s, the reddish-brown tones may have seemed artificially nostalgic. Now, however, the sepia tint carries a different weight— a breath of optimism, as though the middling development and traditional clothing in these photos belong to an era that lies quaintly, and permanently, in Ukraine’s past.

But we know this is not true. Mikhailov’s third and most recent photographic series in the exhibit, At Dusk (1993), shatters any illusion of progress. The expected burst into full color never arrives. Instead, Mikhailov plunges his subjects into a suffocating blue. He overlays the suffering of Ukraine during World War II onto the hardships of the early post-Soviet era, forging a visual continuity of despair. The people are cold, hunched, even falling on the concrete. Necks are curved; heads hang heavily. A snow-frosted statue strains against the metal scaffolding that supports—or impales—it.

A layperson could trace the last few years of Ukraine’s tortured history onto these photographs. First, joy amid the ruins—echoing Ukraine’s seemingly miraculous resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion and the flood of media stories celebrating its everyday acts of defiance. Then, the belief that the worst is in the past, and that the future holds hope. And now, a profound betrayal by the international community, and above all, the United States, of the people of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s history is complicated, fraught, and not perfectly cyclical. A cherry-picked selection of photographs might not entirely explain the present circumstances. And yet, the aggressor today remains the same as in these photographs. Russia’s imprint is visible in the broken slabs of concrete, in the blue-tinged sickle, and in the feeling that the people in these photos are fighting not against individuals, but against a behemoth—one that is omnipresent but invisible. The pictures show industrial remnants, indicating the shortcomings of human engineering, yet they are conspicuously devoid of the humans that created them. Even though they might not see guns, war, or open violence in these photographs, every visitor to the Marian Goodman Gallery can feel the weight of oppression seep through each frame.

What, then, comes next? 

The answer might be found in a dark room at the back of the gallery. In the most contemporary piece in the exhibit, Our Time is Our Burden (2024),  Mikhailov uses video for “rethinking and reworking…the photographic image.” The result was, in my opinion, fragmented chaos. The silent video showed pairs of unrelated images side-by-side for seven minutes straight. Sometimes they seemed to relate to each other, but only if I really stretched my imagination. Mostly the piece felt disjointed and dull. Perhaps it meant to convey the irrationality of this war, perhaps something else, or perhaps I just didn’t understand the point. I don’t know. The meaning of this piece, much like the future of Ukraine, remains a mystery.